


Live

by kototyph



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood and Injury, Episode Fix-It: s15e20 Carry On, Ficlet, Gen, Smack the Sense and Self-Worth into Dean Winchester 2k20
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:28:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27661352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kototyph/pseuds/kototyph
Summary: He can feel the blood soaking into the waistband of his jeans, surprisingly warm down his back as he pushes against the beam to try to shove the last vamp off him, and that’s when Dean knows he’s going to die.
Comments: 24
Kudos: 117





	Live

**Author's Note:**

> I've been incensed since I saw Sam _putting away his phone and any hope of emergency assistance_ so he could listen to Dean's monologue of doom, and this is the result.

He can feel the blood soaking into the waistband of his jeans, surprisingly warm down his back as he pushes against the beam to try to shove the last vamp off him, and that’s when Dean knows he’s going to die.

The vamp’s head disappears off it’s shoulders and the body crumples, leaving Dean staring at Sam instead while his brother glances around the barn with a quick look for the bodies, the shadows, the windows. Nothing moves. The whole place smells like iron and rotten wood, and the only noise is their hard breathing. 

“Alright,” Sam says with a grim look of satisfaction, slipping the machete into his belt. “Let’s go find those kids. Get them out of here.”

He turns to go and Dean manages a hoarse, “ _Sam_ ,” as his fingers start to go numb. His heart’s already falling out of rhythm, a wash of sick shivery cold beginning in his hands and sweeping up his skin. He feels lightheaded.

Sam turns back, an almost impatient look in his eye.

“I— I don’t think I’m going anywhere,” Dean says, voice wavering, and Sam stares at him.

The blood on Sam’s hand just confirms what Dean already knows, rebar scraping against his spine and catching on a rib as Sam’s eyes dart over his face, back to the blood, back to his face. 

“No,” he wheezes as Sam stutters something about help, about a _first aid kit,_ fuck that’s funny, and reaches for a phone. “Please, Sam, just— stay with me? Please?”

“Okay,” Sam says, and then more softly, “okay.” 

“You knew it was always going to end like this for me,” he tells him, mumbling around the blood that’s starting to fill his mouth with every little cough he can’t suppress. “Supposed to end like this, right?”

“No,” his brother whispers. 

Dean tries to smile. For Sam, he can smile. “It’s _okay_ , Sam. Saving people, hunting things—”

“ _No,”_ Sam cuts in, and it’s not soft at all. His eyes are bright and hard as steel, and he shows his teeth as he spits it again. _“_ No, Dean. That’s not the end. This isn’t the end.”

Dean would shake his head if he had the muscle control, but that’s starting to go too. He locks his knees to stay upright, boot sliding on the old hay scattered over the floor. “Sam, listen to me—”

“No, you listen to me,” Sam snaps, voice breaking. 

He steps close, close enough that when Dean lifts a badly shaking hand Sam can shift until it finds his shoulder, his neck, and pulls him in. 

“You fucking _jerk,”_ Sam whispers. “I know it’s hard, Dean. I know, but we’re going to live.”

“Sam—”

 _“We’re going to live,”_ Sam tells him, his own hand on Dean’s shoulder and shaking him gently. “It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be exhausting, and sometimes it’s going to feel so fucking pointless. Sometimes it’ll suck— you think I don’t know? It’ll hurt so bad we’ll want it to end right there and then. 

“But we’re going to keep fighting, even if it’s not part of— of some big story. It’s _our_ story, Dean, and it’s going to be like everybody else’s, for once in our fucking lives. We’re going to get old and slow, and eventually we’re going to die. But first we’re going to _live_ , both of us, and it’ll be good, too. I promise.”

And then he’s gone, jerking away like he has to tear himself off of Dean, diving out the door towards the car. 

“Sam!” Dean yells, real terror arrowing through him now. “Don’t! I don’t want to die,” _alone,_ is the word he means to add. But it gets lost in the sick taste of blood, and echoes in his mind. _I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die._

He’s dizzy, little stars eating up his vision and making his head swim. The barn is dark and getting darker, and he can’t feel anything below the waist anymore. The bubbling in his chest is louder than anything else.

“Sam,” he tries to yell again, and it comes out weak and lost. “Please.”

He probably imagines it, a last artifact his brain throws up before the lights go out for good. He’s died enough to know the stages: the shakes, the thready pulse, the creeping cold.

But it’s not cold. There, at the end, as he listens to his own breath slow and his heart give out, there is instead a warmth that starts to steal over him, so subtly he doesn’t notice until it’s all around him. Winding through him, cushioning the worst of throb in his back, the sticky chill of blood cooling against his skin. 

“... hello?” he asks the darkness, struggling to keep his eyes open.

Nothing answers. The warmth sinks deeper into him, and something like arms or the memory of arms tighten over his ribs, and it’s… it’s familiar.

Dean breathes in, breathes out, and smiles. He tips his head back against the wood, closes his eyes, and the warmth envelopes him until there’s nothing else.

* * *

He wakes up. 

He wasn’t expecting to, but he does. He wakes up because he hears dog nails clicking across the floor and he’s thinking, _damn it, Miracle,_ because the next step is whining and scratching and dawn walks might be fine for fucking weirdos like Sam, but Dean needs his beauty sleep. His beard’s starting to grow in grey.

Then he wakes up a little more, and blinks at Eileen holding her finger to her lips above him just as the dog jumps onto the hospital bed.

“I told Sam to go home and take a nap, sorry,” she’s saying and signing as Dean’s face is enthusiastically and totally coated in slobber. Miracle’s tail is wagging so hard it’s shaking his whole body, and by extension the bed, and whining low in his throat as he plants his paws all over Dean’s sore chest and kidneys. “I figure we have a couple minutes before they find out I brought him in, so enjoy it while it lasts.”

It’s more like sixty seconds, because a nurse saw them in the stairwell, but Eileen takes her licks with such a sincere aura of “Aw shucks, doc, I didn’t mean no harm” that Miracle gets to stay for fifteen supervised minutes, folded up nice and quiet over Dean’s aching legs.

“Sam’s good?” he croaks, once the nurses have gone back into the hallway.

“Sam’s fine,” Eileen says, sipping coffee from a paper cup. “Had to run down to Austin to cover for an Agent... Bon Jovi? But it turned out to be a quick trip.”

“Ha. Hope he remembered to swap badges," Dean says, moving clumsily through the signs. 

Eileen shrugs, takes another sip. “Scared him a little, Dean.”

Dean looks away, towards the window. “Yeah. Scared me, too.”

“No, I mean you really scared him,” Eileen says, and when Dean looks back she looks serious and upset, both hands around the coffee. “So don’t do it again.”

“Alright,” Dean says. “I can… I can try not to. But you know how the life is.”

She smiles then. “How it used to be, yeah. But it’s not just you anymore, Dean.”

Eileen and Miracle get chased out, then, by some perky intern with pink scrubs and velociraptor hiss. Dean’s left to settle back and drift, his chest burning even through the narcotic buzz, and thinks about warmth, and arms that are familiar, and thinks he hears a murmur right on the edge of sleep.

Dean is older than he ever thought he’d be, and tired, and has way more pieces of medical equipment shoved up where the sun don’t shine than seems necessary, but he’ll live.

They’ll live.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](https://kototyph.tumblr.com/) tags for funsies:
> 
> #spn #blood and violence cw #hashtag everyone in this show deserved better #sam and dean and E V E R Y O N E #i'm going to die mad about this #supernatural #15.20 carry on  
> #season 15 spoliers #predicated entirely on the fact that sam could have called 911 #oh #eleven times over during that fake ass season 3 no character growth disrespectful stank ass monologue


End file.
